Reading Elliott Dickman’s assessment of where Sunderland’s academy needed to improve, the feeling of deja vu was unavoidable.

“You look at the Premiership now and the majority of players are a good size, they’re very athletic, they’re mobile and they can play as well. From a technical point of view you have to be very good to deal with that.”

Those were not Dickman’s words, but they echo them very closely. They come from an interview at the Academy of Light with Sunderland’s then academy manager, Ged McNamee in February 2006, back when England’s top-flight was called the Premiership.

Read More

It was hustle and bustle Lynden Gooch pointed to this week when he talked about the qualities Sunderland have imbued him with.

“That’s the way we’ve been brought up in the academy, to work hard, you need to have quality on the ball but if you’re not willing to run around and track back, defend, get up the pitch then you’re not going to play at the highest level,” he said.

Dickman is not paying lip service when he says Sunderland have good young players. They are in the semi-finals of the Premier League International Cup, a tournament designed to give under-23 players exposure to their top European counterparts. One of Manchester United and Porto will go out on Wednesday evening.

Sunderland’s results at reserve-team level have been good for years, but it counts for nothing if it cannot be transferred to first-team level. That has been more difficult since the days of Jordan Henderson and Jack Colback (themselves more about technique than brawn), but the impact Jordan Pickford, Lynden Gooch and Duncan Watmore – signed from Altrincham aged 19 – have had on the first team has gone beyond token appearances. Elsewhere, Conor Hourihane is flourishing six-and-a-half years after the Wearsiders released him.

The appointment of Jimmy Sinclair in McNamee’s place, and the fact that recently-appointed chief football officer Simon Wilson’s brief extends to scouting, recruitment, player pathways and youth development suggests there is more to done – and more importantly they recognise the need to do it.

That goalkeeper Oliver Pain has joined Motherwell on loan, while left-back Tommy Robson has gone to Limerick and centre-back Michael Ledger to Norway’s Viking Stavanger shows how much harder it is to lend players to Football League clubs now it cannot be done outside of transfer windows, but it should also accelerate their growing-up.

These are tough times at Sunderland, both in terms of football and finance. When a club is staring relegation in the face, and when back office staff are facing redundancy, the temptation is to concentrate only on the next first-team result. Short-termism has been very hard to resist for a long time.

But chief executive Martin Bain has been brought in to rebuild the club on more solid foundations, and developing players such as Pickford has always made sound economic sense.

McNamee’s comments show the club has long known what us required, but finding the patience to fully commit to it is the difficult bit.

There will be pain in the coming months – hopefully only off the field – but there will be no gain without a bit more long-term thinking.